Cutting Back on YouTube Content Creation (Part 2)

As touched on in my last article, one of the major elements of this YouTube burnout is the sheer time it takes to create a video. While an article could take all of 15 minutes to write, a video with the same content might take upwards of 2 to 3 hours to make, under less than proper conditions.

Let’s take, for example, a simple video where I talk about a current gaming subject. Let’s presume I already have footage of a game, like Destiny handy, and will be discussing maybe a new Xbox update. Let’s presume I have 10 minutes of audio to record, or so I estimate. That would take, what, 15 minutes to do, total, right? Wrong. It could take up to 30 minutes just to record a portion of the audio, and even that might not be “good enough” between bad takes, sound quality issues, or just me messing up on what I want to say in general. If I script out what I want to say, it reads too forced. If I go off the top of my head, it tends to be a meandering mess of thoughts, and I have to constantly re record to where I don’t mess up. After that comes editing the resulting recording, and normalizing the audio quality… that takes another 20-30 minutes, so let’s say, an hour on audio.

Then comes editing the video together; for a video that’s just voice over, that’s as simple as dropping it in, and editing the beginning and end, adding the outro, and that’s that.

An example timeline, from an hour and a half video project. It took around 4 hours to listen to and edit, double checking myself, and took several more hours to render it’s full hour and a half length

Rendering, however, takes more time, and depending on the quality, it could take upwards of an hour just to render 10 minutes of high quality video. Following that comes upload times, and time to tag, which can also take quite a while.. so we are often talking anywhere between 1 hour to 3 hours for a video to get produced… all for something that would take me 15-20 minutes to write.

If I have to record using the camera, for, let’s say, a system repair video, things get even more crazy. If I flub up in the video portion OR the audio, I still have to edit around or re-take. With a more in depth video like this, as well, comes heavier editing than the previous format, which can add another 20-30 minutes to the overall process.

Examples of varying takes just to become one (now deleted) 10 minute video. Several of these shots took multiple retakes, as you can see from the similar thumbnails.

These times may seem long, but they include me watching and re-watching the content being worked on to ensure everything is solid. I want the video to be as good as possible, and sometimes, it’s just not up to par. One would be amazed how many videos I have worked on but never uploaded.

That’s just a small slice of what it takes for me to make a video, however. I could go into more detail, but I wanted this to be a simple overview. The point is that for the effort it takes, for some videos to only be seen by 10 people, is just not satisfying.

In the next article, we will talk more about what happens once a video is actually up and live, something that, in some ways, is far worse than it not being viewed